Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  “I’m thinking about trying fiction again,” I said. “Memoir is just not doing it.”

  “I really don’t care what you write,” she’d say. “I mean, that’s not really my thing.”

  I’d get upset at it not being her thing. It was my thing, which should make it her thing. Hadn’t we agreed to share all things, as per the wedding vows?

  It’s not that Lauren didn’t want the dream to come true—no, no—the very opposite. But it was my dream, and the possibility of it actually resulting in additional toilets and a general amplification of square footage for surplus baskets of laundry was simply too distant to imagine happening, and my constant request for assistance in dreaming the dream was too much for a woman heavy with child, as she seemed to be, continually, in those days.

  “I love you, but I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said, often.

  She was happy for me, but dammit, it was my dream, not hers. The general vibe I picked up from her in the first decade of our marriage was that I needed to work that shit out with somebody else. She had milk ducts to be engorged.

  * * *

  “Are you having an affair?” Lauren asked, one night in bed.

  In a way, yes. I was having an affair with a story about a talking unicorn, which I felt might be my first enduring masterwork, if I could only figure out the middle.

  “No,” I said. “Have you seen me naked? I’m not sure I could manage it.”

  “It’s just, you’re not here.”

  “I’m here.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I do love you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She touched my arm and we slept, and I rose, and I wrote, and I worked, and I came home from work, and my two little daughters ran to the door to greet me, these little orbs of holy fairy light, casting away any darkness lingering on the ass after another day of failing to make progress toward the something out before me I still could not see. They did not know they were fairy orbs. They had no idea.

  The quark of my ambition dimmed a little, on the worst days, when I questioned every decision that had led me far into this bleak wilderness alone, while my wife seemed lost in her own wilderness of motherhood. Just over the horizon, my future was waiting, but I had no idea. I saw no horizon. I wanted out of this self-imposed Sinai, to be with the girls, to be normal, whatever that was, to tighten the faucet of our love, to take Lauren and the children to the park and just sit, and play, and not dream.

  “Tuck me in,” Stargoat said.

  “Me, too,” Beetle said.

  “Daddy?” Stargoat said. “Are you a writer? Mommy said you’re a writer.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  * * *

  The year I turned thirty-five, emergency maneuvers were called for. The dream felt more urgent than ever, an appendix about to burst. At work, I thrived. Opportunities were presented, promotions, new windfalls of money that might expand and enrich our daily lives. I could feel the dream telling me goodbye.

  I found myself, more and more, speaking with Paula, boss and mentor, about the future.

  “What do you want to do?” Paula said.

  Nobody had asked me that since high school, really. It knocked the wind out of me.

  I could say anything: Buy a nicer house? Move to a nicer neighborhood? Have a second home? Invest? Travel? Contribute to the flourishing of the university in some new administrative capacity? That’s another impossible feature of dreaming—the temptations to abandon your dream are not always cruel and trifling. Sometimes you are tempted by important and meaningful options, which make the dream seem vapid and foolish.

  “You could lead people,” Paula said.

  “I could,” I said.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I want to write a book,” I said.

  It sounded so petty and small, to write a book, a silly thing, a feat that might only take a few weeks if I would only apply myself, according to the National Novel Writing Month zealots.

  “A book, okay,” Paula said. “You can write a book. Why not?”

  I think she must’ve seen how much I wanted it, the burning ache of it emanating off my skin when I said the word book. I needed time to write it, I told her, or felt I might lose the vision of the man I wanted to be. I had a family that must be taken care of, and the weight of this burden grew more tremendous and precipitous with every sunrise and sunset. The children had begun eating processed chicken at a rate that could not be sustained without continual infusions of cash.

  Life was getting away from me, I told her.

  Paula listened. She had a dream, too, to create a university, which now employed and educated many thousands of people. I guess she knew a fellow dreamer when she saw one.

  “I want it so badly,” I said. “And it seems so impossible.”

  When I heard myself saying all these things out loud, the words became oxygen to the fire inside me, and the tiny dream-ember burst into happy flame.

  That summer, 2010, mornings and nights and weekends, I wrote a memoir longhand, page after page, morning after morning, all summer long, until the bones of my hand resisted and groaned. I left my computer and headphones at home to silence the din of social media that made writing so pleasant and impossible, and by summer’s end, I had finished the manuscript, which lived inside a squat tower of spiral notebooks.

  I put it aside for a month, to let it cool.

  And then I read it, and wept. It was an amazing disaster, boring, meandering, flat, themes raised and abandoned, jokes left to die by the roadside. The story lacked sophistication and those focused expressions of human desire that make a story dance on the page. I had dithered away the most frenzied writing season of my life on a derivative work of nonfiction that was such a poor representation of memory and history that it seemed to cheapen everything that mattered most from my past. I was angry. The thought of starting over made my heart hurt.

  But still, somehow, that fall, I kept waking my ass up and hauling it to a chair. It became a kind of prayer. I shook myself awake and cracked my knuckles and wrote, old documents, new documents, anything, words, dangling myself over the canvas of the white page making the drip painting of my dream, not knowing anything about what it might turn into.

  These hours of writing became the realest hours of the day, where I attempted to declare on paper everything I’d kept hidden from others, all the true things I stored in the walnut box of my heart. The habit of writing had begun to shape my very consciousness to the point that I even forgot what I was supposed to be writing or how. I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and something happened.

  * * *

  Because think about it: If you spend 150 minutes doing the same thing every day, and you do this seven days a week all year long with no exceptions, not even family vacations or grave illness, you even got up extra early on Christmas morning to do this thing before the house woke up, and you behave in this mad way for five or seven or ten years, can you imagine?

  During that long wilderness inside the cave, I read many good books and wrote many bad stories and began to divine the multifarious brilliant ways that writers accomplished the manufacture of the thing that makes you turn the page. Some created suspense with thrilling action, others with ridiculous bone-jarring prose that made you keep reading just to see what new metonymy this writer would use to shake your mind out of its old skin. These lessons accreted over time, slowly.

  Because if you stay with it, here’s what happens:

  You wake up one morning and tiptoe past the children and pick your heart up off the kitchen table where you charged it overnight and you drive to a well-lit place to stare out the window with your hands in your pants because your hands are cold and your pants are warm. You’ve been doing this foolishness every morning for nearly seven years now, and hating yourself, and hating your work, until such time as you hate it slightly less, until such time as your expectation level also increases, so that even as you hate it less, you actuall
y hate it more.

  The work is getting better.

  And you love it.

  And you hate it.

  And you love it.

  They say writing is like giving birth, and it is, it’s just like giving birth, during the Middle Ages, when all the babies died. You get up every day and try to push out a baby, and when it finally comes out, it’s dead, and if it’s not dead, it should be, so you take it to the bathtub and drown it, and then you get upset and consider what fun it would be to take that promotion they’re offering at the college, which will take up what remaining stores you have of time and energy but which will give you the money you desire for the home for your wife, who has not yet called you a bum even though, really, who are we kidding, you are a bum, and then you get up the next day and decide to be a writer again and have another dead baby, and you look in the mirror, and you’re like: This is not fun.

  You could be making money.

  You could be paying off your school loans.

  You could be doing so much for your family.

  But no!

  Do not listen to this demon!

  Stay with it, friend.

  Stay with it. Because every now and then, one of those babies comes out and it’s the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen. It has plot like a good, healthy baby. It’s got exactly the right number of commas, and its paragraphs are perfectly bilateral. And you forget about all the dead babies for the last ten years and you hold that baby tight and spellcheck it like a good parent should.

  In reality, it is a very ugly baby, but you don’t care.

  Its eyes are too far apart.

  One of its ears is shaped all weird.

  It has three arms.

  But you don’t care. So you send this baby to a magazine, and they mail you back a little postcard that says your baby is, in fact, sort of ugly.

  But no, you say. It is my baby!

  You made it. It is perfect.

  And then you look long and hard at the baby, and you realize: Yes, it is an ugly baby. So you do like Abraham, and take it out back behind the woodshed to kill it, but God doesn’t stop you like he stopped Abraham and so you kill your baby, and weep. And you wake up again and make another baby, and more and more babies, a whole army of ugly, three-armed babies, and send them out into the world so all the editorial interns can kill them for you.

  And then one day it happens, you get an email from an editor saying they see something special in one of your ugly babies and they offer to help you make it less ugly by giving it a haircut that might keep its brow from seeming so prominent, or by removing one of the arms in a non-invasive way. And before you know it, a few of your ugly baby stories are alive on the Internet for anybody to see, and you soar, with pelican wings, and you run, and are not weary, and you walk, and do not faint.

  Act III

  THE PART WHERE WE ROLL AROUND NAKED ON ALL THE MONEY

  Chapter 8

  Is pointing and laughing something we do naturally, or do we have to learn it? Likewise, can someone without a sense of humor be taught to have one, or must it be beaten into him?

  —JACK HANDEY, “The Mysteries of Humor”

  SUDDENLY, IN A GREAT MAD RUSH, EVERYTHING THAT happened, every scene, every bit of overheard dialogue, every sound and sensation against my skin, the flavor of new and familiar foods, everything came alive. The world re-enchanted itself. Trees spoke. Feet cried out. Odors tiptoed around corners, waiting to attack. All around me, for so long, life had been falling away, uncaptured, unremembered, unconsidered, and writing, I now saw, was a way for me to grab onto it, to clutch and know it. It didn’t matter what it was, a memory from last week or a lifetime ago. Why did that happen? Why did I feel that way when I saw that airplane? When I smelled that animal? When I heard my daughter cry for the first time? Meaning was embedded in creation if I would only just seize it.

  “I wrote something funny,” I’d say to Lauren every month or two.

  “Great.”

  “Can I read it to you?”

  She wanted to hit me in the face with a bat, you could tell. But the children were asleep and she was tired and didn’t have the energy to run away.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I’d read, and before I finished, I already knew: It wasn’t funny. I could tell, because there was no urine on the floor, not even a little. I’d look everywhere for it. There, over there in the corner, was that her urine? No. How about right there, under the coffee table? Nope. That was somebody else’s urine, one of the children’s, perhaps.

  What made me funny, and how could I alchemize that quality into language? I could make Lauren wet herself, going on about Dollywood, but not with a story. In many ways, Lauren’s bladder was too distracted in those days, as was the rest of her body, now that she was pregnant again. Like Stargoat and Beetle, this imminent baby, according to the nurse, was also wielding a uterus. Our home had become an ovary farm.

  See? That was funny. Why couldn’t I write something like that?

  * * *

  The funniest thing I ever did on purpose was in graduate school, at a coffee house in Carbondale, Illinois, where every Friday night everybody stood up and read really intense poems about Islamophobia and cutting. One poetry night, I stood up and approached the mic in a very serious and somber way. I coughed a little, pathetically. There was a cosmic silence, in the small, dark coffee shop. These solemn holy moments are when I most desire to be funny.

  There was the shuffling of a chair. The flush of a distant toilet. I pulled the poem out of my pocket, unfolded it. It seemed like a funeral. Everybody could tell this was going to be a pretty intense poem about depression or the Patriot Act.

  “This is a love poem,” I said.

  And then I read the lyrics to “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. I read it like the saddest love poem ever written, how Jesse had himself a girl and how I wanted to make her mine and how she was loving him with that body, I just knew it. At first, nobody laughed, but by the end, I had them dying, cheering. It was easily one of the holiest moments of my life.

  That was the feeling I sought to create, in others and my own heart, with my writing.

  I checked out a few books. I read E. B. White’s “Some Remarks on Humor,” which I did not find helpful, and I read William Zinsser’s “Humor” chapter from On Writing Well, which I also did not find helpful, and I read Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which I found very helpful for making me want to set myself on fire.

  I went back and looked at all the funny novels and memoirs I’d ever read, and any book described as laugh-out-loud funny! on the back cover, and what I learned is that people who say that on the backs of books are liars, for I did not laugh out loud or even very quietly.

  “Can you recommend any funny books?” I asked at every bookstore I visited in those days, and the helpful employees walked me to the humor section, and I reported those people to the police because I did not want to write a joke book. Sometimes, I’d buy what they recommended and then throw those books into the ocean and then retrieve them, for littering was also not funny, and not funny was clearly my specialty.

  One thing I have since learned about myself is how the formal qualities that most often disgust me in literature are usually the very qualities I am trying to improve in my own work. When attempting to write a roman à clef, I loathed all Kerouac and Hemingway. If I tried to write a thriller, I found other thrillers repulsive. If I was hoping to sound less formal and more authoritative, then I detested the work of breezy, authoritative essayists. I think I was worried about stealing good ideas from others, borrowing solutions to narrative problems. I wanted to solve the problems of art on my own, which is a foolish thing to want. Scientists build off prior discoveries. Artists should, too.

  This predilection for hating what I most needed to learn was especially true of comedy, and the harder I looked for comedy I didn’t hate, the harder it was to find. I went to the library and read every great funny thing th
at was ever supposedly great and funny, and I prayed that God would let me not hate all of it.

  Aristophanes

  Ephron

  Nordan

  O’Connor

  Perelman

  Plautus

  Portis

  Saunders

  Shakespeare

  Thompson

  Thurber

  Twain

  Wolfe

  I worked hard at not working hard, teaching myself to let the left side of my brain rest while my right got a bucket of popcorn and learned to laugh again. I copied down in a notebook every funny passage I could find to study how it was made. That’s what most of the epigraphs in this book are—lines and paragraphs I found funny and wanted to understand why.

  I began to note certain techniques, how misdirection and surprise were essential, for example. One must write the very thing one is not expected to write at that moment in the sentence. There’s a prestidigitation to it. Incongruity reigns. One describes a strange thing plainly, a plain thing strangely. Rhythm, also. As Seinfeld once said, it’s more like writing a song than a sentence.

  Most especially, I began to note a kind of weird expressionistic warping of facts in funny writing, the way Van Gogh painted cypresses. You can tell these are trees he is painting, but he torques them, makes them look like black fire. He doesn’t make them not-trees, he just makes them look to your eyes the way they looked to his bewildered heart, like dark windswept flame.

  I began to see this candid distortion all around me. I’d find myself noting the many remarkable ways people walk and run, how some young woman jogging in the park would let her arms hang all weird, like they weren’t even there, like she didn’t even know she had arms, even though, I was pretty sure she knew she had arms. That’s the factual distortion that gets to the truth, which is: The woman runs weird.

  I started writing more in this way, the way Francis Bacon paints faces, the way George Bellows paints bodies. It wasn’t lying: I was merely attempting to show the reader how ridiculous the thing looked to my heart, such that ideas and objects were distorted, brighter, bigger, Fauvist, postimpressionist, some details omitted, ignored, others heightened, lit on fire, so you could see them from space.